The other day, while we were walking from my office back to the lab, one of my students asked me a question that’s perfect for a Dorky Poll:

What’s the coolest single word you’ve encountered in physics?

His vote was for “antineutrino,” but I’ve got to go with “counterintuitive,” as in “Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage uses a counterintuitive pulse sequence to excite atoms without populating the intermediate state,” or “the idea of making atoms cold by shining laser light on them is somewhat counterintuitive.”

“Counterintuitive” captures a lot of what I enjoy most about physics. We work with a small number of very general rules that govern the way the world works, and those rules don’t have a great deal of flexibility. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t surprises, though– if you’re clever enough, you can find ways to exploit those rules to give you results that seem to fly in the face of common sense. And yet, those results are every bit as inevitable as the common-sense result that objects dropped near the surface of the earth will fall under the influence of gravity.

That’s what I find cool in physics, and so I think “counter-intuitive” is the coolest single word I’ve run into in the field.

Comments

Perturbation
It gives me a delightful mental image of taking some monstrous complicated system and poking a corner of it with one finger, then predicting how the finger poke is going to change the overall behavior (up to order finger-poke^3).

PerturbationIt gives me a delightful mental image of taking some monstrous complicated system and poking a corner of it with one finger, then predicting how the finger poke is going to change the overall behavior (up to order finger-poke^3).

When I talk to our first-year seminar class about BEC, I note that there’s a certain similarity between physicists and small children: when presented with a new substance, their first instinct is to poke it and see what happens. Hence, the early BEC experiments in which the Ketterle group pushed their condensate with a laser, and watched it wiggle back and forth.

VibraSeis trucks are used as the “sound” source for some land geophysical surveys. The Love wave (or SH wave) is the transverse wave with movement parallel to the ground surface that is created under certain conditions in an earthquake.

Like Cyrptic Ned, I’d like to throw in some non-physics words, try retrodeformational, subcrop, stereonet, Emuckfaw group and Gumsuck Branch anticline. Geologist get to cheat since we name stratigraphy (and sometimes structures) by the type location. Steronet is cool mostly because it can cause entire rooms of non-strucutural geologist to run screaming from the room.

Well, I was going to say “quark” because it’s such a fun little word, but there are so many better ones being mentioned that I’ll have to reserve judgment until I see a more complete list of candidates! (Sparticle is currently high on the list, as is boojums – that’s a real word?)

Embiggen.
Non-renormalizable, because it sort of sounds like a word to describe a person with an untreatable mental illness.
Also, anisotropy, compactification, torque, and others, in no apparent order and for no apparent reason. While not technically one word, and perhaps not so exciting in its own right, some classmates and I decided that the phrase “nominally monochromatic neutrons” would be a pretty good name for a band (someone had to give that as a reason for something, right?).
And speaking of German ones, for some reason the name “Institut fur Experimentalphysik” always makes me chuckle.

I dunno if it’s strictly a physics term, but I’ve always liked googolplex.

A boojum, by the way, is also a tree, called cirio in Spanish, that grows only in northern Baja California (beginning about 200 km from the border and extending another 200 km south), on the coast of Sonora in mainland Mexico, and on a few islands in between. It needs very little water to survive (duh), grows very, very slowly, and looks like an enormous (up to 20 m) horseradish root with tiny little twigs sticking out of its trunk. The name comes from Lewis Carroll, I think; maybe from “Jabberwocky.”

I’ve always liked magnetohydrodynamics because its the toughest thing I’ve ever studied and the only thing I ever understood about it was the name.

But for coolest I’m fond of chirality. It’s a fun word that I actually wish more people knew, because ‘whether something cares if it is right or left handed’ is a lot of words to have to use. This was best illustrated by a story.

We are at the Boston RenFaire and my wife finds a leather hair clip thingy that she likes. But the clip is aligned so as to be put on with the right hand, and she’s a lefty. I turn to the guy behind the counter and, start to say something like, ‘My wife is left-handed, do you one of these that is designed to be put on with the other hand…’ assuming I’m going to get a quizzical look. Instead after the words ‘left-handed’ he interrupts with, ‘Nope, only one chirality.’ I love RenFaires. Being a geek has unexpected pleasures.

[Bizarre aside. Firefox’s built in spell checker has no problem with magnetohydrodynamics but is balking at chirality?]

One thing this thread demonstrates is that the second thing a physicist does, right after poking the thing, is to give a name to the result. That is the start of the “stamp collecting” phase of science. The first step in communication is to share a name for a thing. When it is a funny name for a common thing, like “chiral” for handedness, so much the better.

Like Chad, counterintuitive has always been a favorite of mine because it baffles students when I use it in an intro class to describe a demo I just did. Six syllables is a lot for those texters! I also like telling them the cross product obeys a non-Abelian algebra.

Some of those listed (like boojum) were borrowed or invented just to sound cool, after the success of “quark” and “charm”. The decade after November 1974 was thick with them.

[Note to newbies: track down the April 1974 AIP proceedings with the short paper about charm with the “eat your hats” bet, and read the theoretical commentary with its Rove-like dismissal of that “charming” idea. You might not realize just how radical and unpopular the idea was.]

I had forgotten about polhode. Technical terms like “winding number” are great when used in public. I wonder what people in the restaurant think when my wife and I are talking about making adjustments in the luminosity channel (in PhotoShop). [What cable system do they have?]

One I really like is “eigenvalue”, because we adopted a german translation of an english phrase when that math was rediscovered by german physicists, and it found its way all the way back into our math textbooks!

Eigen Decomposition ( Wolfram MathWorld )
The matrix decomposition of a square matrix A into so-called eigenvalues and eigenvectors is an extremely important one. This decomposition generally goes under the name …

Eigen Decomposition Theorem ( Wolfram MathWorld )
Let P be a matrix of eigenvectors of a given square matrix A and D be a diagonal matrix with the corresponding eigenvalues on the diagonal. Then, as long as P is a square …

Eigenvalue ( Wolfram MathWorld )
Eigenvalues are a special set of scalars associated with a linear system of equations (i.e., a matrix equation) that are sometimes also known as characteristic roots, …

Eigenvector ( Wolfram MathWorld )
Eigenvectors are a special set of vectors associated with a linear system of equations (i.e., a matrix equation) that are sometimes also known as characteristic vectors, …

Singular Value Decomposition ( Wolfram MathWorld )
If a matrix A has a matrix of eigenvectors P that is not invertible (for example, the matrix [1 1; 0 1] has the noninvertible system of eigenvectors [1 0; 0 0]), then A does …

Eigenform ( Wolfram MathWorld )
Given a differential operator D on the space of differential forms, an eigenform is a form alpha such that Dalpha==lambdaalpha for some constant lambda. For example, on the …

Eigenfunction ( Wolfram MathWorld )
If L^~ is a linear operator on a function space, then f is an eigenfunction for L^~ and lambda is the associated eigenvalue whenever L^~f==lambdaf.Renteln and Dundes (2005) …

Eigenspace ( Wolfram MathWorld )
If A is an nxn square matrix and lambda is an eigenvalue of A, then the union of the zero vector 0 and the set of all eigenvectors corresponding to eigenvalues lambda is a …

And some others.

Travel in Eigenspace. Battle of Eigenspace. Russell Eigenblick: tyrant of Eigenspace. I was a teenaged dropout from the Physics Department, decomposing in Eigenspace…

Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing